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Committee pack
VISION We want to empower you to create active and thriving communities. We see the amazing success stories from across the region and want to support their continued growth and prosperity. The dream is that every city or suburb will have an active community our players can be apart of and belong to. Unlocking opportunities to meet other like minded players, form bonds and participate in fun events. We believe that League of Legends is a better place with the continued success of communities like yours. SUCCESS STORIES University of New South Wales Back in 2012, Brendan Yun was in high school and already looking toward university with longing eyes. He was excited about the idea of joining a society, especially if he could find a League of Legends one. “I told myself that if there wasn’t a LoL society I would start one myself,” he recalls. “I read that you just needed five people to start a society, and if there wasn’t one then I would just find five of my friends and go from there.” When Brendan arrived on campus, he made straight for the club offices where all the societies are registered. They told him there already was a LoL club and gave him the contact details. As it turns out, the UNSW LoL Society, or LoLsoc, was just getting started and Brendan put his hand up to help run events straight away. “There was a lot of experimentation back then because it was new,” explains Brendan. “We tried barbeques, LANs, tournaments and things to see what people loved the most.” Those days of experimentation lead to the robust program that LoLSoc now has running on all cylinders.. They have over 2,000 members on the Facebook group and around 600 registered members on campus. “Nowadays we run quite a lot of events,” he adds. “We run barbeques, social LANs, competitive tournaments and a lot of one-off events like viewing parties.” One of the most successful events on the calendar is the yearly Launch Party. This year saw over 200 people showing up and it comes just a week after O-Week. “That event is always really popular and it happens every year,” says Brendan. “We have a lot of activities and prizes lined up. We try to get everybody in a big room at the university with art competitions, trivia, ice breakers and things like that.” The goal of the event is to give club members a chance to interact with each other and make friends. “We sign you in and we give you a sheet that’s sort of like bingo in a way,” explains Brendan. It will say find someone you don’t know’s summoner name, talk to them for a few minutes - you might have to find an ADC main and find out three things about them.” The icebreaker has evolved over the years. Now instead of just filling out a checklist and moving on, members are encouraged to go back and interact with them again. “We now have them form a trivia team where you have to connect with someone from the sheet you just filled in,” explains Brendan. “So even if you came with a group of friends, you would have had to find someone you don’t know and then say ‘hey I talked to you earlier, do you want to join our trivia team?” These days Brendan is now the president of the club and has helped to build up a robust leadership structure. “We have the president, then below that we have three vice presidents that form up the executive team,” he says. “One deals with administration and handles the documentation and the official grants we need to get funding for our events. Then there’s the operations VP that deals with the creation of events and then there’s the marketing VP who handles promotion to get the word out.” Powering that structure is the director team, which help each of the vice presidents to run their section. Brendan is the first to admit that it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. “We had a problem in 2014 when we had lots of communication issues,” he recalls. “Marketing wasn’t on the same page as operations and people would be standing around not knowing what they are supposed to be doing. This lead to deadlines not being met and it made things worse.” Back then the team was just relying on ad-hoc Facebook messages and it wasn’t providing the right level of visibility. “We switched to Trello and that really helped the communication flow throughout the society,” explains Brendan. “Now we don’t have the problem of people not being on the same page.” One of the things Brendan’s team has implemented is a monthly meeting of both the exec and director level teams. “Prior to the meeting we would have our VP for admin talk to everybody and collaborate everyone’s concerns and what they want to talk about in the meeting,” he says. “He will put down a meeting agenda and we go through the list of items. “So the first thing might be feedback on a barbeque,” he adds. “We’ll talk about it and go through things like maybe there wasn’t enough sausages, or maybe the line was going too slowly. We’ll talk about it, write it up and for the next one we can refer back to the feedback so we don’t have the same problems.” According to Brendan, it’s also really important to celebrate your wins after a big event with a gathering for the organisers, something like a night out together. Or even a road trip. “In 2015 we hit the road with our whole committee during the semester break,” he says. “We went up to Terrigal with everybody and we had a lot of team-building exercises as well as general relaxing and talking to each other.” For Brendan, it’s both sweet and sour because this is his final year and he’s heading towards graduation, but he knows the club is in a good place. If he could travel back in time and tell the younger Brendan one thing as he was joining up it would be to stay connected with your society members. “You need to make sure you always stay in contact with the community,” he suggests. “You need to talk to them and get to know them on a personal level. It really helps in starting a club and they will tell their friends.” “A lot of the potential members for your society are people that are really apprehensive to come,” he says. “They just play LoL at home, they don’t think that people can be enthusiastic enough to hold a society for it. Those are the people you’re missing if you don’t make great personal connections.” Queensland University of Technology In 2013, Nathan Wong had the idea of running a tournament. He thought it would be awesome to create a match between players at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and traditional rivals University of Queensland. The only problem is there was no QUT LoL club. So Nathan headed over to the Gamer’s Society and asked if he could run a tournament with them. At that meeting was Andre Abelita who was already working on a plan to run more LoL events and from that QUT LoL was born. These days the club has over 1,700 Facebook members and a registered membership on campus of 300. According to Nathan, one of the reasons the club has been so successful is their emphasis on splitting social and competitive events. “For our social events we didn’t want to play Normals or Ranked,” he explains. “For things like normal the really good people would smash everyone else so we wanted to play game modes that are nonsensical and everyone could enjoy.” From those early events has come the formula they use for the fortnightly social and the QUT LCS. “The fortnightly social is where everyone meets up, plays some social games like Donger Dash, Hide and Seek or one of the new game modes on weekends. We also host things like QUT LCS at an internet cafe for the competitive side of things.” If there’s something QUTLoL has become known for it’s the viewing parties. The biggest ever was in 2014 for Worlds when it was even larger than the State of Origin viewing party. “We approached the university bar as they had internet, projectors and televisions,” recalls Nathan. “I went up to the bar owner and said I am looking to organise a viewing party. He’s like ‘you mean for football or rugby or something?’ He gave me a funny look when i told him it was for League of Legends. “He gave us a reasonable rate and said he would put on one or two staff thinking it wouldn’t be busy,” Nathan says with a grin. “On the night we had 300 people, the venue was almost at max capacity and the owner had to work the whole night himself. Our group photo even made it to onto the Worlds stream.” For Nathan, the success was also built on having a lean executive team. “We have a president, then a vice president, a secretary and a treasurer,” he explains. “Really that’s all you need.” According to Andre, they’ll then mobilise volunteers to help with the running of actual events based on what’s needed. “Volunteers are people who have been members for a long time and have come to lots of social events and are passionate about what they do,” he says. “They are great and know exactly what’s expected.” It’s been a journey for both Nathan and Andre, who were strangers at the beginning and have now become friends and hang out almost every day. “When I first started university I started playing League of Legends,” recalls Nathan. “And I didn’t have any friends to talk to about League and being a part of the club helped me do that.” “Watching other people make friends through the club as well made it all worthwhile. No matter where you come from, if you play League and you talk to another person that plays the game, you can both talk about it forever,” he adds. “You can both hate on Teemo,” Andre quips. Building a committee The foundation stone of a successful community is the leadership team. On the following pages are leadership roles that have worked for some communities: President The captain of the ship is the easiest role to mess up. If you take on too much responsibility, or try to micro manage your people too much then you can easily run aground. You’re only as strong as your weakest link so you will want to make sure that you build a robust committee to help the society stay on course. Vice President There’s a reason that you shouldn’t go it alone. This is more than just a trusted deputy, this is someone that can run the club just as well as you can. They need to be able to challenge you, keep you grounded, and take on just as much responsibility as you can. Administration Lead Every leadership role has administrative responsibilities, but this one is the organiser with the ability to connect all the dots. Treasurer Handling the purse strings of a university club is no mean feat. You need someone to be concerned about how much something will cost, what suppliers you’re going to use and where that will leave the financial position of the club at the end of the month. Events Lead Being the head of the events team is a massive job. It needs to be someone super motivated to run events and are fueled by that live experience. It’s the kind of person that at the end of the night when everyone is tired, and you’ve only just finished packing up, that begins merrily talking about the next one. Traits to look for Unfortunately not everyone makes a good committee member. It may seem tough at first, and you may just want to grab the first person that raises their hand, but it is important to stop and think if they really are the best choice. Some key traits that you want to look for: Organiser This is the difference between being ‘good’ at putting something together when they have to and being the person that is more ‘Hey why don’t we run a tournament?’ and has the drive to see that become a reality. Community Driven This is someone that is fueled by bringing people together. You want to have a conversation about how important it is to help people connect with others and make friends and see your future committee member come alive with enthusiasm. Relationship Builder You want someone that is invested in building the club first and foremost. You don’t want people coming in for the power trip of telling people what to do. That’s not what a committee member does, they empower others to do their best. Integrity Club values are super important and you want your leadership team to reflect those values and to be prepared to stand by them. When there’s a tough situation you need to know you can trust your team to uphold what’s really important. Reliable You need people that say they will do something and you don’t have to follow up on it. You need them to take ownership of their section and to be reliable enough to see it done.